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Crabs in space

By Sharon Levy

NORMAN Wainwright reaches into his aquarium tank and pulls out an otherworldly being. The horseshoe crab, her legs waving in alarm, looks both ancient and alien – a cross between a trilobite and a miniature Starship Enterprise. It is an odd combination, but remarkably appropriate. This is one of Earth’s oldest creatures, that has barely changed over the past 200 million years, and it is now being catapulted into the space age.

Wainwright has been studying these curious animals for more than a decade. Last year he took his research to a new frontier when he carried an extract of horseshoe crab blood with him aboard the Vomit Comet, the high-tech jet NASA uses to simulate zero gravity. While lurching through the atmosphere at high speed, he proved that a primeval defence system, the immune response of the horseshoe crab, can work in space. He is also proud and a little surprised to recall that he managed to retain his lunch.

Back on the ground in his lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts (MBL), Wainwright holds a wriggling horseshoe crab and gently inserts a needle into the space between her solid carapace and her tail, collecting a few millilitres of blood from a vein in her back. He adds the translucent fluid to a test tube containing bacteria and it changes from a nondescript, neutral shade to bright sky blue as the copper in the oxygen-carrying molecules oxidises. Seconds later as the crab’s immune system gets to work, it gels into a clot.